We’re celebrating because it is the sixth anniversary of the very first post here on PuzzleNation Blog! Yes, we’ve been on this puzzly journey together since August of 2012, and in my admittedly biased yet humble opinion, it’s been a brilliant one.

In those six years, we’ve published over a thousand posts! (More than nine hundred of them penned by yours truly.) We’ve delved into puzzle history, cracked diabolical brain teasers, marked milestones like the centenary of the crossword, and even rejoiced at puzzly proposals of marriage!

And to celebrate six years of PuzzleNation Blog, we’ve got a week of activities planned for our marvelous readers and fellow puzzlers!

For starters, we’re loading over a hundred new pins to our Pinterest account for your viewing pleasure!

And we’re launching a promotion across all of our social media platforms to celebrate the anniversary. It’s our PuzzleNation 6th Anniversary Contest!

(These will be separate from the usual Crossword Clue Challenge posts, and we’ll mark them with “PuzzleNation 6th Anniversary Contest” to distinguish them.)

Message us on FB or Twitter with the answer, or message us on Instagram with the answer to a brain teaser, and you’ll go into a drawing for a terrific prize! (And yes, since there are different brain teasers each day and different answers for each of the two daily puzzles, you can enter multiple times to increase your odds of winning!)

Enjoy the contest, fellow puzzlers. It’s a small thank you for being a part of the PuzzleNation community.

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The mobius strip is one of the simplest objects in the world, and yet, the most mind-bending. If you take a strip of paper, add a single twist, and tape the ends together, you transform a two-sided object into a single-sided object. It becomes one continuous surface.

(We’ve discussed the concept briefly in the blog before, but in bagel form.)

But did you know that you can take that idea a step further and end up with this?

This is a Klein bottle, an object with one continuous surface. If you trace a path along the surface, you will traverse from the “inside” to the “outside” and back again without breaking stride.

Yes, the word “bottle” is a bit of a misnomer, since this won’t actually hold any liquids; they would just flow along the surface, going “inside” and back “out” without pooling anywhere. This is a result of a mistranslation, as the German word “flache” (surface) was translated as “flasche” (bottle).

This limerick sums up the Klein bottle nicely:

A German topologist named Klein
Thought the Mobius Loop was divine.
Said he, “If you glue
The edges of two,
You get a weird bottle like mine.”

Although the Klein bottle can’t quite exist as a three-dimensional object — since the object has to pass through itself, which can only happen in four dimensions — we can come close enough to create some impressive approximations, like the glass “Klein bottles” pictured above.

YouTuber and physics student Toby Hendy has even managed to create a technique to knit yourself a Klein bottle hat! Check it out:

Although it’s not an optical illusion, it’s still a visual puzzle for the eyes and the mind, one that has captured the imaginations of mathematicians, artists, and many others throughout the years.

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There’s nothing quite like the grating blare of your alarm clock to rouse you from a sound sleep. But for some people, the alarm isn’t enough.

If you’re adept at whacking the snooze button or shutting off the alarm entirely — intentionally or not, since I’ve definitely done one or both in my sleep from time to time — you might need something a bit more devious to ensure you get up in the morning.

Some place their alarm clock out of reach, so they have to get up to shut it off. One buddy of mine, an adept snooze button-smasher, would return to bed after getting up, so this technique didn’t work.

We found an alarm clock that actually shot a small rocket across the room, and refused to stop beeping until you retrieved the rocket and placed it back on the alarm clock’s launchpad. That seemed to do the trick for him.

But the question remains… how do you make an alarm clock that ensures you’re awake?

The app is called I Can’t Wake Up, and it requires you to complete a series of puzzly tasks before the alarm shuts off. These can range from memory tasks and placing numbers in order to retyping strings of gibberish or repeating a sequence of clicks Simon-style.

Essentially, you control the difficulty and complexity of the tasks you’re required to solve. So, if you know you NEED to be up for an important meeting in the morning, you can set the alarm to be louder and more diabolical.

I suspect this will start a trend in puzzly alarm apps, where you have to solve a crossword, conquer a Sudoku, or even decrypt a random message in order to stop your alarm.

Either that, or it will become the perfect tool for vengeful wives, husbands, significant others, parents, roommates, and others who are affected by the unreliable morning wake-ups of others.

In any case, I look forward to hearing about it.

[Don’t be like this unfortunate stormtrooper… Image courtesy of Pinterest.]

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As I was writing Tuesday’s post and returning to the world of crossword-inspired art, it made me wonder what other puzzly works are out there, waiting to be discovered, appreciated, and perhaps mistakenly filled in.

So I did a little digging, a little Googling, and a little research, and I thought I’d introduce you, my fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers, to some of the crossword-infused works of art I discovered.

So, without further ado or hullabaloo, let’s get to it!

This work from 2005, entitled “I Can’t Read,” is a collage of crossword and newsprint, and although I discovered it on Crossword City, it was originally posted on the DeviantArt account of content creator PrairiePunk.

This Untitled piece by artist Juliet A is just one of several crossword-inspired pieces I found on the website Milliande.com. They featured themed weeks for posts, and “crossword puzzles” apparently provided plenty of inspiration for several impressive, engaging creations.

This wonderful bit of crossword-fueled street art, discovered in Ghent, Belgium, was posted on Pinterest.

Inspired by the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, as well as the Saskatoon art scene itself, this work by Megan Mormon was developed for partygoers to play with and solve (with post-its provided). The clues and entries are all geared toward local art.

My personal favorite was this piece by Tony Blue, entitled Crosswords 2, a work of mixed media on canvas.

Puzzles meet performance in this sketch by Emily Jo Cureton, based on key words from the May 16, 2008, New York Times crossword.

Crosswords have even found their way into the world of nail art, as typified by this design by Hannah Rox Nails, created for Girls’ Life. [Note: the link leads to a YouTube page.]

I’ll close out today’s gallery with this intriguing piece of interactive crossword puzzle art, created by Gary Hill. The ever-shifting view of the grid only allows you to examine small portions at once, leaving you curiously adrift as you solve along with the artist.

This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to crossword-inspired art. A quick Google search or targeted Pinterest hunt will reveal many more.

For a few more pieces of crossword art, complete with commentary from the artists themselves, check out this article from CrosswordUnclued.com.

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For the uninitiated, a portmanteau is a word that combines two words and represents aspects of both of them. Smog is a portmanteau of smoke and fog. Spork, avionics, brunch, labradoodle, cyborg, Pinterest, webinar, glitterati, Reaganomics, sharknado…these are all portmanteau words.

It can be a handy way to coin a term for a situation that doesn’t already have a word to describe it. For instance, I like to think of that unpleasant sensation that you’re going to drop your car keys down a storm drain as “sedanxiety.” A disastrous kiss? “Liplockalypse.”

And clearly I’m not the only one who enjoys crafting new portmanteaus.